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Life on the road

FIFTEEN centuries ago, a wealthy public servant was buried in northeastern China. His grave was rediscovered by accident in 1999.

Panel 5 of Yu Hong's sarcophagus.
Panel 5 of Yu Hong's sarcophagus.
TheAustralian

FIFTEEN centuries ago, a wealthy public servant whom we know as Yu Hong was buried in northeastern China. His grave was rediscovered by accident in 1999 when a peasant was repairing a dirt road, very close to where a water main had been laid down only four years before; the burial had miraculously escaped the severe damage that might have been caused by mechanical digging equipment and was found almost intact, although it later appeared that it had been robbed in the century or so after the interment.

It took the form of a chamber composed of marble slabs, carved in low relief, and this is how it has been ingeniously displayed at the Art Gallery of NSW, but opened out to allow the viewer to walk around inside what was a very confined space. A photograph on one of the wall panels makes the original appearance clear, but to understand the layout in the show, one should turn from the map of the Silk Road towards the room's centre: from this viewpoint one is looking through the entrance of the tomb to the carved panels of its back wall.

It is obvious at once this is a fascinating object of great beauty: each panel is carved in low relief with elaborate narrative scenes and surrounded by decorative borders; the relief is shallow, with flat surfaces and sharp edges, emphasising ornamental, patterned effect rather than the naturalistic rendering of volume; and traces of bright paint and even gilding survive in places.

What is most striking, however, is that the iconography is clearly not Chinese. There are figures with prominent noses - almost too prominent, as though exaggerated by a Chinese artist to whom they appeared outlandish - and long thick beards, as well as numerous motifs that recall Persian, Byzantine or even Greco-Roman classical art. We find ourselves, in other words, before a kind of time capsule that comes to us from a complex and partly forgotten world.

The inscription on the lid of the coffin tells us Yu Hong lived from 533 or 534 to 592, a period of great historical importance but to most of us among the least familiar in history. In China, it was the latter part of a time of instability that followed the fall of the Han dynasty in the third century and preceded the establishment of the Tang dynasty in the seventh. In the Mediterranean, it was the century after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a period during which its surviving eastern half, which became the Byzantine Empire, had temporarily reconquered some of the lands lost to barbarian invasion.

But many other fateful events occurred in the sixth century: the black death came to Constantinople, and population upheavals across Eurasia brought Turkic peoples from their eastern homelands into the central Asian area. At the end of the period, the rise of Islam led to the Arab conquests of vast areas of the world in the early seventh century, including a large part of the Byzantine territories as well as Persia and other lands in central Asia.

The sarcophagus thus belongs to the last period before Islam supplanted the older religions of these areas, and this accounts for much of the iconography of the carvings. It also leads us to the identity of Yu Hong himself, for the apparently Chinese name is deceptive. Analysis of his DNA shows his ethnic origins lay much farther west: he is described as having European ancestry on the exhibition labels and in the catalogue, although this presumably means more exactly Indo-European, while his wife appears to have been Eurasian.

It seems to be generally agreed that Yu Hong was a Sogdian; they were an Iranian people who spoke a now extinct language related to Persian. More nomadic than their cousins, however, they were prominent in the trade along the Silk Road, a network that ran ultimately from the Mediterranean to China, covering an immense distance through often inhospitable lands north of the Himalayas; Edmund Capon relates in his catalogue essay that Aurel Stein, the great orientalist who travelled the Silk Road a century ago, found the ink in his pen froze during the icy nights in the Taklamakan Desert.

Silk was the most valuable commodity traded from East to West and until the sixth century remained a Chinese monopoly. It was during the reign of Justinian that silkworm eggs were smuggled out of China and brought to Constantinople for the first time.

But the system of trade routes also carried many other goods and helped to transmit styles, ideas and even religious beliefs; it was thus that Buddhism travelled from India to China, where it was at the height of its popularity at this time.

Yu Hong, born in the Yu kingdom, was sent on a diplomatic mission to Persia while still a teenager and later settled in China, becoming a senior government official under several successive regimes. He lived in a diverse and multicultural milieu, must have been fluent in several languages and would have been familiar with a great variety, indeed a potentially bewildering range, of religious doctrines, beliefs and practices.

But such diversity is not necessarily an obstacle to belief in polytheistic systems. It is only monotheistic religions that cannot accept any variations on or rivals to their unique divinity, which is why they have such a dismal record of intolerance and bigotry. Most of the world's other religions are prepared to accept there are other gods beside those they worship or to identify their gods with those of new people they encounter.

Thus Yu Hong seems to have adopted some kind of fusion of the Zoroastrian religion of the Persians and Sogdians, probably assimilated in his childhood, with the Buddhism he would have encountered on his travels and that widely was practised around him. Although the Zoroastrians are often considered proto-monotheistic, they believed the world was the scene of a struggle between a beneficent deity, Ahura Mazda, god of light, and the evil Ahriman, demon of darkness. This dualism had a powerful influence farther west as well, giving rise to the Manichean heresy in the early Christian Church, later revived in the medieval beliefs of the Cathars.

Buddhism, which in the original teachings of Siddhartha was hardly a religion at all, since it involved no divinity and was intended only to free its disciples from the illusion of reality created by desire, had by now - more than 1000 years later - evolved into an elaborate system of belief with its own divinities, demons and, especially in the variety practised in China, the belief in an afterlife of happiness reserved for believers.

This is what we seem to see represented in the central panel at the back of the sarcophagus, facing the entrance: Yu Hong and his wife sit in a heavenly pavilion at the top of which is the Buddhist motif of the pearl. She kneels or sits cross-legged, but he is represented sitting with one leg crossed in an attitude associated with Amitabha Buddha, as they feast together, entertained by a collection of musicians.

In the centre of the scene, however, is another reminder of Yu Hong's Western origins: a dancer shown as he alights from a leaping pirouette, grinning with almost grotesque features and an enormous nose. And on closer inspection, almost all the attendants and musicians have clearly non-Chinese features, as well as the deceased man himself, with his long Iranian face and thick beard.

Still more striking are the images directly below, which represent men fighting with lions. Almost mirror images, they move with a balletic grace, especially in their legs and pointed feet, although the head of each is being devoured by a lion; one, indeed, has already pierced the lion with his sword, but too late to save his life. On the flanking side panels too, a pair of men, one mounted on a camel and the other on a diminutive elephant, are engaged in a struggle with lions.

This motif has been associated with the Zoroastrian iconography in which Ahriman, the spirit of evil and darkness, is represented as a lion. The subject of the lion hunt had already been a powerful symbol of royal valour under the Assyrians who preceded the Persians, and it was a durable one: when Alexander, by conquering Persia, became the successor to Cyrus the Great and his descendants - as was recognised in the Persian historical epic, the Shahnameh - he felt it incumbent on him to hunt lions to symbolise the legitimacy of his claim.

Even the motif of the lion attacking the bull, found at Persepolis and much imitated in Greek art after Alexander (as in the Hellenistic Lion attacking a horse from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, on loan to the Getty Museum in Malibu earlier this year) is present here, with an interesting and telling nuance: the lion, a subject probably unfamiliar to the artist and perhaps copied, as has been suggested, from a pattern-book, is stylised and archaic in form. The ox, on the other hand, ananimal the artist could see every day in thefields in China, is represented much more naturalistically.

Here, then, one seems to find the image of peace achieved in the heaven of Amitabha, which is also the afterlife of Zoroastrianism, surrounded by scenes evoking the struggle against the forces of evil that is recurrent in our earthly life, or perhaps, in Buddhist terms, the struggle against illusion, as in the story of Siddartha's temptation by the demon Mara before he attained enlightenment.

On either side of the entrance is a pair of panels symmetrical in composition and clearly intended to be read together: on the right, a riderless horse - associated with the dead inZoroastrian belief - is being prepared byattendants, while on the left a rider carrying a pomegranate advances serenely above the relief of the lion and the ox in the lower register.

It would be tempting to identify the rider as Yu Hong entering paradise but for the fact this figure is beardless and more youthful, and that the two adjacent panels of another rider and a seated figure inside the tomb more closely resemble the bearded figure of the central paradise scene. It is very possible this figure could be Prince Siddhartha himself, leaving his youthful life of luxury to begin his spiritual quest.

In the centre of the front panel, meanwhile, two strange figures, half bird, half man, tend the sacred Zoroastrian fire, which, in a perfect expression of syncretistic reconciliation, is directly below the relief in which the dead man enjoys the rewards of the afterlife.

Silk Road Saga: The Sarcophagus of Yu Hong, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to November 10.

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/life-on-the-road/news-story/6f9c4351ce54391c89fc7ea8d370675c